Dear HM Courts and Tribunals Service,

1) How many times in the last 3 years (up to the 1 November 2022) has the Customer Investigation Team failed to meet the promise made by HMCTS that they would respond “within 15 working days” with a “reconsideration” of decisions made about complaints by Customer Service Managers and Senior Customer Service Managers? If the number is so great as to exceed the £600 maximum retrieval of information time costs please reduce the period of time to 2 years, and – if still too great - by 6 monthly intervals.
2) How many times in the last 3 years (up to 1 November 2022) has the Customer Investigation Team failed to “reconsider” a decision after 50 “working days” thus exceeding their promised response time by 35 “working days”! If this would exceed the maximum £600 retrieval of information costs please reduce the time accordingly – see above). When this has happened has the Customer Investigation Team apologised? I know this has happened on AT LEAST one occasion – the Customer Investigation Team has now failed to provide me with a consideration after 54 “working days”. They also failed to acknowledge receipt of my request for a “reconsideration” and ignored a reminder 3 weeks later. HMCTS no doubt regard this as acceptable customer response behaviour.
3) How many times has a Customer Service Manager promised a complaint will be reviewed by a Senior Customer Service Manager and that promise has been reneged upon? How many times when that has happened has the (non-Senior) Customer Manager then reviewed her own complaint. This has happened on AT LEAST ONE OCCASION. Ms A Lee promised me my complaint about her decision would be ‘reviewed by a Senior Customer Service Manager’. She ignored that promise and reviewed HER OWN DECISION. Although the Prime Minister has promised that government departments will act with integrity and professionalism, the HMCTS will no doubt turn a blind idea to the obvious conflict of interest involved in Ms Lee’s behaviour: her ‘review’ was clearly biased, ignored irrefutable evidence, and was an egregious betrayal of the Civil Service Code.
4) How many times has Customer Service Manager, Ms A Lee, in an official HMCTS “review” of her own decision ignored the irrefutable evidence that a Small Claims claimant has been told that he was alerted to the fact that a Stay would be put upon his claim if he did not respond to offer of mediation from a defendant on a portal. This was a lie: there was no mention in the email referred to by Ms Lee of a ‘Stay’ being placed on my claim. This would clearly qualify as ‘maladministration’.
5) How many times has Customer Service Manager Ms A Lee ignored irrefutable email evidence from FMS Delivery Manager, Lesley Norman, of conflicting information, and then declared that I have NOT been provided with CONFLICTING INFORMATION?
6) Are 4) and 5) above the real reason why the Customer Investigation Team have decided to BURY my request for a “reconsideration”?
7) Can the Customer Investigation Team guarantee if I send the request for a “reconsideration” as a hard copy in an envelope sent by ‘Special Delivery’ (costing over £6 – I would have said ‘1st class signed for delivery’ but for the fact that I have sent 2 documents ‘1st class, signed for delivery’ within the last 6 weeks and neither was ‘delivered’ – one sent ‘Special delivery’ was delivered) then the Customer Investigations Team might deign to ‘reconsider’ Ms Lee’s review of her own decision?
8) Is there any information available on HMCTS or MoJ websites as to why some FOI Requests and requests for internal reviews are dealt with by 'HMCTS' staff officials and some by the 'MoJ Disclosure Team'. If the reason for this isn't provided on their websites can HMCTS or the MoJ point me to any guidance on this that is available online elsewhere. Does the fact that HMCTS is part of the MoJ mean they are interchangeable when it comes to responding to FOI Requests? Is the HMCTS like the purportedly independent JCIO who are 'part of the Judicial Office' and also - like the JO - an 'arms-length body of the MoJ' ? The allegedly 'independent' JCIO is - like the JO - exempt from the FOI Act but will sometimes answer FOI Requests 'on a discretionary basis. Is HMCTS also exempt from the FOIA but answers requests on a 'discretionary basis?

Yours faithfully,

Dudley Jones

Dear HMCTS Customer Service (Correspondence),
You say answers to the questions I asked for information on in Points 3 to 5 have been covered in the appeal stage complaint response by CIT sent on 8 December 2022. Unfortunately, I can find no trace of that email in my inbox. I have also checked my ‘Junk mail’ and ‘Trash’ boxes. Could I please ask you to re-send it?

In any event, my FOI Request was made on the whatdotheyknow.com site and responses to the questions that fall within the FOIA remit should be posted on the site on which they were made. So if you could simply copy your response to 'Points 3-5 above from the 8 December email into a response to this letter, I’d be most grateful.

Had you requested my permission to send your Points 3-5 in an email and secured my consent (which – on principle - I would not have given) then including them within an email would have been permissible.

You point out in your response to Points 1 & 2 that you make no promise to respond to complaints within 15 working days. That’s just as well, isn’t it? You say it’s ‘your target to respond to 90% of complaints within 15 working days’.

Presumably it’s a target that is very RARELY MET. I say this because you didn’t meet that target on 1524 occasions between 2019 and 2022 – that’s an astonishing annual average of over 300 where you didn’t meet your target.

And over those 3 years you have failed to respond to complaints within 50 working days on 133 occasions! If you fail to meet your 15 day target it’s because of the complexity of some of the complaints. You must have an awful lot of very complex complaints.

It took you 64 working days (based on the 8 December email you refer to) to respond to my complaint – and that’s allowing a very generous number of Bank Holiday days (including the Queen’s death).

You couldn’t even argue that that there was anything ‘complex’ about my complaint. I provided you with evidence from your own 13 May email that the claim I was told a ‘stay’ would be put on my claim if I didn’t respond to a company’s mediation offer was entirely FALSE. How could that not be a case of ‘maladministration’?

I provided CIT email evidence that proved that having been told by a manager who dismissed my complaint that a senior manager would review my challenge to her decision, the decision was reviewed not by a SENIOR manager but the very same ordinary manager who’d rejected it in the first instance. She was marking her own homework and applauding her own performance: another open-and-shut case of ‘maladministration’.

And again I provided emails from L**** N***** which prove I was supplied with 'conflicting information'. Another open-and-shut verdict: guilty as charged on providing 'conflicting information'.

My point is there was no complexity about my complaint, it was entirely straightforward and yet it took you 64 working days to respond!

There’s also the fact that it is clearly standard practice of HMCTS not to acknowledge receipt either of complaints or of reminders and further requests for acknowledgement of receipt. How do you reconcile this with our PM’s promise of ‘Integrity and PROFESSIONALISM.’ Are these professional standards?

In a 27 October 2020 FOI Response, you state:
'We normally respond to complaints within 10 working days at the first and second stages of
our complaints procedure and within 15 days at the final stage. This isn’t always possible -
for instance if we need to do a detailed investigation into what has happened. We should
keep the person making the complaint updated about this. They can also contact the team
handling the complaint if they’d like to check what’s happening, after the normal timescales
for responding have passed'.

You are clearly failing miserably to live up to your promises in this response. ‘We should keep the person making the complaint updated’ when an investigation is taking longer than anticipated' you say. Did you keep me updated? No – you didn’t communicate with me once in 64 working days.

I look forward to you honouring your responsibilities to the whatdotheyknow site and posting your FOI Responses to Points 3-5 on this FOI Request form . And I look forward eagerly to receiving your CIT Complaint response in a re-sent email.

Yours sincerely,

Dudley Jones

Dear HM Courts and Tribunals Service,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of HM Courts and Tribunals Service's handling of my FOI request 'Questions surrounding HMCTS's Customer Investigations Team ignoring 'reconsideration' of a Manager's decision'.

You said in your Response you’d provided the information requested on points 1 and 2 but that points 6,7,8 fell outside the remit of the FOIA.

About points 6, 7, and 8 you were quite correct, and I’ve apologised for this oversight. Curiously, you later said point 2 was also outside the FOIA remit. There you were wrong and the fact that you provided the information for 2 in your original FOI Response, proves that.

Your FOI Response said: ‘Points 3 to 5 have been covered in the appeal stage complaint response by CIT sent on 8 December 2022’. Unfortunately, you can’t play fast and loose with the rules like that. Points 3-5 – like points 1 and 2 which you have answered – were made in an FOI Response on the whatdotheyknow.com site. You’re therefore obliged to respond to all the legitimate requests for information on that site. You have to abide by the rules: you can’t pick and choose which ones you respond to privately, and which on a site where your response is freely available for anyone to view.

I’ve too much respect for the integrity and fair-mindedness of the HMCTS (or is it the MoJ?) to think you deliberately chose to divert points 3-5 to a private email letter as a way of ensuring dishonest or evasive answers to those points wouldn’t be available for public view.

Let me remind you of points 3-5 in my original FOI Request and then your answers in an email letter to me. And can I ask the person conducting this review to consider whether the HMCTS/MoJ’s original response on the WDTK public site and their other responses in a private email lives up to their proud commitment to truthfulness, fairness and integrity – a commitment which, until now, I have never questioned.

Here's Point 3 of my 22 November 2022 FOI Request:

3) How many times has a Customer Service Manager promised a complaint will be reviewed by a Senior Customer Service Manager and that promise has been reneged upon? How many times when that has happened has the (non-Senior) Customer Manager then reviewed her own complaint. This has happened on AT LEAST ONE OCCASION. Ms A Lee promised me my complaint about her decision would be ‘reviewed by a Senior Customer Service Manager’. She ignored that promise and reviewed HER OWN DECISION. Although the Prime Minister has promised that government departments will act with ‘integrity and professionalism’, the HMCTS will no doubt turn a blind idea to the obvious conflict of interest involved in Ms Lee’s behaviour: her ‘review’ was clearly biased, ignored irrefutable evidence, and was an egregious betrayal of the Civil Service Code.

HMCTS’s FOI Response to Points 3 (and 4) is provided by Richard Redgrave, Head of Customer Investigations. He says ‘Ms A Lee didn’t review her own decision, she reviewed the first contact response which was provided by Mrs R Mason.’

Mr Redgrave cleverly ignores the first part of point 3: ‘How many times has a Customer Service Manager promised a complaint will be reviewed by a Senior Customer Service Manager and that promise has been reneged upon?’ Ms Lee emailed me on the 19 August 2022 to tell me my complaint ‘will be reviewed by a senior manager who will reply to you by 30 August’.

The complaint review was sent 6 September and it came from Ms Lee who is NOT a senior manager. Perhaps this is why Mr Redgrave chose to ignore it?

As I’ve already argued, this reneging on a promise (the fact that Ms Lee is a manager NOT a senior manager) surely qualifies as ‘maladministration’? I provide proof it’s happened once but my FOI question asks how many more times in the last 3 years has it happened? Alas, Mr Redgrave chose to ignore both this question and the fact that Ms Lee reneged on a clear commitment she’d made.

4) Point 4 of my FOI Request asks how many times in an official review of a decision has a Small Claims complainant been told that he ‘was alerted to the fact that a ‘stay would be put upon his claim if he did not respond to an offer of mediation from a defendant on a portal. This was a lie: there was no mention in the email referred to by Ms Lee of a “Stay” being placed on my claim. This would clearly qualify as “Maladministration”.’

What is the Response to this question from Richard Redgrave, the Head of Customer Investigations?

‘We didn’t explicitly tell you that a lack of response would result in a stay being placed on your claim for the reasons explained above’.

The 'reason' referred to is, that it’s not ‘part of the role’ of the HMCTS to tell you things like that.

What an astonishing display of callous indifference to me, an ordinary member of the public. I was constantly forced to make long, expensive phone calls to try to get information about HMCTS procedure. I wasted endless amounts of time because of the incompetence of HMCTS officials: sending me a N244 form which couldn’t be edited; failing to fill in the date by which an essential ‘Directions Questionnaire’ must be returned, and then telling me I must pay a £108 fine (Redgrave calls it a fee) to have a ‘Stay’ imposed on my claim, lifted. This is because – according to HMCTS officials - I hadn’t responded to an email sent on the 13 May which they say alerted me to the fact that a Stay would be put on my claim if I didn’t respond. Unfortunately, this was an HMCTS lie – the email made no mention of a stay being put on my claim if I didn’t respond.

This is the Response from the Head of Customer Investigations within a government department responsible for ensuring that our justice system is run fairly and justly. The latest HMCTS email update emphasises ‘fairness’ which stands at the heart of their system. Is this what Mr Redgrave thinks is ‘fair’?

Note Mr Redgrave’s phrase: ‘We didn’t EXPLICITLY [my emphasis] tell you that a lack of response would result in a stay being placed on your claim’. Let me translate that into ordinary human, non-HMCTS speak: ‘We DID NOT TELL you a lack of response would result in a stay being placed on your claim’. To which he might add: ‘we thought we’d let you work that out for yourself and then to make it more tricky, the email we said alerted you to this danger, didn’t.’

5) FOI Request Point 5:
‘How many times has Customer Servicer Manager ignored irrefutable evidence from FMS Delivery Manager, Lesley Norman of conflicting information and then declared that I have NOT been provided with CONFLICTING INFORMATION?’

Refuting emails from Lesley Norman that provided me with contradictory advice makes huge demands on Mr Redgrave’s ingenuity. Here are the facts, the evidence: on the 9 June, Lesley Norman emailed me to say:

‘mediation is confidential and is done over the telephone where the mediator will speak to each party separately.’

This contradicts what she told me earlier on the 20 May:

‘I assume the other party are happy to proceed via telephone We could look at a face-to-face appointment for yourself.’

The clearest possible case of ‘conflicting information’. So how does Richard Redgrave respond to this irrefutable evidence of conflicting information? He says: ‘I can’t see that Ms A Lee or Lesley Norman provided you with conflicting information’. Really? Is this a severe case of myopia?

The reference to Lee is a clever red herring. I didn’t say Ms Lee had provided me with conflicting information. What I did say in my Formal Complaint about Ms A Lee (and Mrs Mason) in my 13 September email letter was:

‘Why is there not a SINGLE reference to Lesley Norman (who is after all, a Manager) in either Ms Mason’s review or Miss Lee’s review?’ [I refer here to Lee’s review of the 6 September]. For Mason and Lee, Lesley Norman is the elephant in the room.

My 13 September Formal Complaint email letter was 15 pages long – it is meticulously documented with precise dated references to emails, quotes from emails and has an Appendix. The quotes of conflicting information from Norman are on page 5 – Redgrave must have read them but he ignore virtually everything I say on page 5.

What is the hidden piece of “evidence” Redgrave relies on to support his absurd and mendacious claim that ‘he can’t see Lesley Norman provided [me] with conflicting information? He says, ‘On 1 June you called us to say you didn’t want to mediate.’

Ah, he’s relying on a phone call. That’s his ‘EVIDENCE’. It conveniently is not evidence that can be easily checked. The only way I can check it is by applying for an SAR of a recording of the phone call which – by law – HMCTS are obliged to provide me. I will be applying for this SAR.

But what will it prove? It is irrelevant: either I’ve been provided with conflicting information or I haven’t. To quote again from page 5 of my 13 September email: ‘Ms Norman’s contradictory information induced a state of constant confusion’. I didn’t make one phone call, I made a number, and kept getting either new information about the precise nature of ‘face-to-face mediation, or conflicting information. Mr Redgrave is always very light on context – in what context did I say I didn’t want to mediate? Did I express frustration at the lack of CLEAR information, and the conflicting information?

I regard Mr Redgrave’s attempt to deny I received conflicting information as beneath contempt. It indicates how far he’s prepared to go to protect colleagues.

Finally, I’d like the person conducting this internal review to consider whether the FOI Response to points 1 and 2 meets the standards of integrity, fairness, and professionalism, Rishi Sunac said he expects for government departments.

In your 16 December 2022 FOI Response on the WDTK site you say that in the 3 years between 2019 and 2022 you failed to meet your aim of responding to email complaints within 15 working days on 1524 occasions! And in the same period there were 133 complaints that were not responded to within 50 days!
This is failure on a grand scale. But is it far worse than your Response suggests? It was 64 working days (and I’ve taken out bank holidays etc) before I received a response to my Formal Complaint about Ms Lee – and there was no acknowledgement of this email or a later reminder. I’ve now learnt it’s HMCTS policy never to acknowledge receipt of COMPLAINT emails.

You attempt to justify this by saying in your FOI Response that it’s only your ‘aim’ to respond within 15 days (that’s the period cited in an email to me). Then you vaguely allude to your target being to respond to 90% of complaints in 15 days. Really? If you failed to meet that target in 1524 cases over 3 years, It prompts the question: did you actually get anywhere near that target of 90% in the last year? Do I need to submit another FOI Request for you to answer that?

I’d like to know whether the person conducting this internal review thinks your performance in responding to complaints is adequate or needs substantial improvement. And can you confirm it is standard HMCTS policy not to acknowledge receipt of complaints?

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/q...
Yours faithfully,

Dudley Jones

Dear Disclosure Team,

With reference to your request for your own reference number of your initial response on this site: Is the Ministry of Justice Data Access Team seriously telling me they don’t have access to their own initial FOI Response on this whatdotheyknow.com site - the one they posted on the 16 December and is readily available for all to see on this site? Is it any wonder that I have wasted several hours (and over £23 money on phone calls) because of the incompetence of HMCTS administration – incompetence which sympathetic and helpful call assistants have apologised for?

I provide below what was freely available on the wdtk site – I have no other reference numbers etc that Data Access Team can’t locate themselves.

Bear in mind, however, that any ‘internal review’ will need to include the FOI Responses to my original FOI questions 3, 4 and 5. HMCTS/MoJ adopted the extraordinary and unprecedented manoeuvre of answering some of my FOI questions on the whatdotheyknow.com site and leaving FOI questions 3-5 answered by Richard Redgrave, Head of Customer Investigations in a private email to me. It meant these Responses were no available to public view. I can’t think why he did this.

I have looked at over 1,000 FOI Responses on the wdtk site and I can’t find any other reputable organisation that has responded to a FOI Request in this way. I assume Mr Redgrave’s letter is available to you – if it isn’t just email me and I’ll forward a copy to you. It will, of course, be needed for the person conducting the Internal Review.

Mr D Jones [email address]
Disclosure Team Ministry of Justice 102 Petty France London SW1H 9AJ [email address]
16 December 2022

8 December 2022 Complaint ref: 31980856
Your ref: 288MC146
Response to FOI Request of 22 November 2022 from Richard Redgrave, Head of Customer Investigations

Yours sincerely,

Dudley Jones

Dear Disclosure Team,

I provide here the reference number and other relevant information from your FOI Response of 16 December 2022:

Mr D Jones [email address] Disclosure Team Ministry of Justice 102 Petty France London SW1H 9AJ [email address] 16 December 2022 Dear Mr Jones, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Request – 221120003

Can I add one observation to my FOI Request which relates to what Mr Redgrave, Head of Customer Investigations said about HMCTS very frequent failures to respond to a request for a reconsideration of a complaint review 'within 15 working days. He attempts to justify the 64 'working days' it took HMCTS Complaints Team to respond to my request for a reconsideration of my complaint by claiming HMCTS makes no promise to 'respond within 15 days'. Really Mr Redgrave?

If by this you mean Ms Lee (a Manager) didn't actually say 'I promise you Mr Jones, we will respond within 15 working days', you are correct. But would it not be more honest and honourable for HMCTS to say: 'We aim to provide a response within 15 working days' or 'Normally we would expect to provide you with a response within 15 working days' or 'we hope to provide a response within 15 working days?

Can I also remind the official who conducts the Internal Review that it should review not simply the questions answered in the HMCTS's FOI Response on the Wwhatdotheyknow.com site here but also the the FOI questions answered/responded to in private letters to me.

Yours sincerely,

Dudley Jones